CFP AAG 2020: Whiteness in Rural Geographies: Productive Intersections with Critical Race Studies (apologies for cross-posting!)

 

Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, Denver, Colorado, April 6-10, 2020

 

Discussant: Joshua Inwood, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA

 

Session organizers:

Gabe Schwartzman, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Gretchen Sneegas, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

 

Sponsored by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group and Rural Geography Specialty Group.

 

From electoral politics to popular culture, the relationship between ‘Rural America’ and whiteness is increasingly on display in media coverage and experienced through the resounding effects of nationalist politics. Whiteness as an identity, ideology and politics has long been a useful analytic for geographers understanding the production and maintenance of rural spaces in the settler societies of the US and Canada (Scott 2010; Lensmire 2017). Furthermore, theorizations of white supremacy have enabled scholars of race and racialization to examine the modalities of power that create regimes of racialized violence and uneven development across space (Bonds and Inwood 2016).

 

Looking to rural geographies, this session extends conversations occurring in Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Studies and Rural Geography around the power of racialization and white supremacy to produce space. We consider that white supremacy “describes and locates white racial domination by underscoring the material production and violence of racial structures and the hegemony of whiteness in settler societies.” (Bonds and Inwood 2016: 716). This session invites scholarship that examines whiteness, white supremacy and settler colonialism in rural geographies of US and Canada. Responding to calls to critically engage with the maintenance of whiteness in a ‘white discipline’ (Derickson 2017), this session seeks papers that will expand theorizations of whiteness and rural geography in relation to racialization, blackness, indigeneity, orientalism and white supremacy. We believe a relational approach to whiteness and its constitutive others may advance our understanding of the cultural and political economic geographies that produce and depend on oppression, rather than simply enumerating the effects of oppression(Woods 2002; McKittrick 2014; Williamson 2016). Additionally, we seek to train a focus of study away from the effects of violence enacted on Indigenous, Brown and Black people and onto the technologies of violence that constitute violent relations of power (Tuck and Yang 2015; Derickson 2017).

 

Building upon studies of race, racialization and whiteness in rural geography (e.g. Neal 2009; Scott 2010; Nelson et al 2015), this CFP seeks multi-disciplinary approaches to these topics, including from rural geography, rural studies, Black Geographies, Latinx Geographies, Critical Indigenous Studies, political economy, agrarian studies, political ecology, critical whiteness studies and studies of race and racialization. Papers in this session should critically leverage insights from across such approaches as Critical Race Theory, Black Geographies, Latinx Geographies, Native Studies and/or Black Studies (e.g. see: McKittrick and Woods 2007; Tuck and Yang 2012; Glenn 2015; Eaves 2016; Sharpe 2016; Speed 2017; Bledsoe et al 2017; Cahaus 2018; Wright and Bledsoe 2019), as bodies of scholarship that extensively and relationally theorize whiteness. By examining whiteness not as an object onto itself, but in relation to white supremacy, settler colonialism, racialization and anti-blackness, this session intends to further develop the geographically situated ways in which white people benefit from whiteness in rural settings.

 

This session invites papers that address these themes to critically examine themes of race and racialization in rural landscapes. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

 

  • Theorizing whiteness as white supremacy in rural geographies
  • Relational analyses of rurality and whiteness
  • Whiteness in rural geographies of settler colonialism
  • Theorizations of whiteness and rurality in relation to anti-blackness
  • Technologies of whiteness and erasures of people of color in rural settings
  • Whiteness, racial capitalism and rural geography
  • Whiteness and ideology, identity and politics in rural geographies
  • Political ecology, rural geography, and whiteness

 

Please submit an abstract of 250 words or less to Gabe Schwartzman (schw2217 [at] umn.edu) and Gretchen Sneegas (gsneegas [at] tamu.edu) no later than Friday, October 4. We will aim to notify session participants no later than Monday, October 7 to allow time for early-bird registration.